Can altitude cause stupid?
May 16, 2008 by Karen
My phone rings yesterday, & I looked at the caller ID, saw who it was, & thought it was strange. Normally when a CasCo work order comes in, it’s via email, not the phone. Then he tells me what the deal is. A fish vendor for a store in our area called him to report that an idiot employee put Drano in a stopped up line on a system, & Chris has to fix it. Without letting the Drano into the rest of the system, if possible. The long & the short of it is that Chris did it, without killing any fish. The line is clear, flushed, & the useless Drano couldn’t unstop the clog, which turned out to be a very good thing. If it had, the complete inventory of warm water fish would have been goners. Drano will melt soap in a trap, but not the snails & fish bodies that was the clog. (Drano is lye with chemicals.)
A point was brought up when I was on the phone with Chris’ contact. He’s in Texas, in the Houston area, which would make Denver seem high up. The store that had the issue is in Monument, which is somewhere between 7,500′ & 8,000′. Can altitude cause stupid? Can a person be perpetually deprived of oxygen at that level & become dumb? I don’t think it happens all the time, because we know people who live in Conifer & Evergreen who aren’t stupid.
No, I don’t think so. I think it just happened that the store employee had no idea about how delicate fish are, & how the systems work, who happened to see a stupid plumber that was in the store to clear a line there. I don’t think the altitude had any part of it. It was a convergence of 1 ignorant person & 1 stupid plumber who each had the same goal.
Although at this particular point in time, I have no room to call anyone “stupid”. I tried to save money when I last bought fish food, didn’t get the good stuff, now I have 2 tanks with crapped up water. (No Chris, I didn’t overfeed.) I will pay for my own stupid moment this afternoon when I have to do water changes on both of them. At least it wasn’t the 210. Thank goodness all that one needs is the filters cleaned.
